3 Ways to Get Feedback

Extracting opinions from busy stakeholders

Are there ways to get ongoing feedback as a product manager?  Product managers work with a variety of groups and people in their daily work.  With the typical product launch cycle being weeks to months, customer feedback from launch events is infrequent.  Outside of customer conversations, product managers don't have many opportunities for feedback about their contribution to the product's success. 

There are 3 steps product managers can take to gain more feedback from the product team, stakeholders, and senior leaders in the organization.  With practice, these steps bring constructive opinions from your internal stakeholders.

Ask Questions

Suppose you are working on requirements for a new capability in your product that is scheduled for review in a few weeks.  The leadership team wants this capability along with a bunch of customer-requested features.  Everyone seems too busy with customer features to look at early drafts of your requirements.  Should you wait until the requirements review in a few weeks to get constructive feedback?

This is the time to start asking questions!  The questions need to be very specific and targeted to the key influencers.  Here are some example questions:

• Should we do use case x before doing use case y?

• Would customer A want this workflow?

• If we have this capability, would customers consume more?

• Would customers need less support from us if we add this capability?

It is possible that the key influencers are going to be too busy to answer your questions. However, it is a victory for you even if you don't get feedback.  If key people refuse to answer your questions, then you have a perfect opening to strategize with your manager about the state of the requirements.  This provides an opportunity to figure out if you need to change your approach, organization priorities need to change, or you need to delay the requirements review to a later time.

Stop Talking and Listen

Being quiet and listening might make you feel vulnerable.  Taking the prior requirements example and the team is too busy to review draft requirements, your questions might be passed to people you don't know to handle.  This is not an issue because you need feedback on the draft requirements.  This is when to stop talking and listen to the opinions of others. 

Taking notes and getting references to key material will be important in having well-prepared requirements.  The best part of listening is getting feedback before your requirements are on display in the big review.

Learn and Absorb

You need to allow time to reflect on what you have learned from your questions and your listening.  You might need to redo your prior work or change your ideas.  In the above requirements example where the team is too busy to work with you, you can pause to sum up what you learned from questions and listening. 

Even if the only thing you can do is write a table of the responses you got to your specific questions, this is usually enough to absorb the feedback.  You are surprised how a short pause gives you the clarity to make adjustments.

Conclusion

As a key leader in the organization, you are challenged to maintain an optimistic outlook without feedback from your stakeholders.  Frequent feedback leads to better results which in turn builds your confidence in leading the product team.  Asking specific questions, learning and adjusting are 3 steps then enable you to gain constructive feedback.